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Levitz 6 days ago

This is basically the case right now in Spain.

We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media.

Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.

crote 6 days ago | parent [-]

The Netherlands has the same tax, but they managed to ban the "sharing media" part.

First they outlawed uploading media (you could make a copy for your own use, but as you didn't hold the rights you weren't allowed to offer it to anyone else), then they outlawed the downloading as well (you can still make a copy for your own use, but you can't obtain it from someone who doesn't have the rights to offer it to you).

You aren't even allowed to download a copy of a piece of media you already legally own, so the only thing left is making a copy of a physical disk - which is of course made nearly impossible by copy protection.

The organisation behind it is now even claiming that you should pay the tax when a streaming service uses storage space on your device to temporarily make an offline copy...

chairmansteve 5 days ago | parent [-]

I guess we're going to have to go back to telling stories around a campfire....